Even with his eyes closed, she could see the lonely man she’d caught in her mind’s eye. Something in her wanted to answer the emptiness in him. Had it come from losing his brother? Had that made him feel lonely and lost?
She felt close to him. Maybe that wasn’t good, considering how limited their relationship had to be, but she wanted to understand him even better. “It must have been so hard on you to lose your brother,” she said. “Were you close?”
Rick’s eyes flew open. “Whoa, where did that come from?”
She couldn’t tell him what she’d seen in his face. “I was just wondering about what you told me before. I mean about your brother being killed. And how that must have affected you. You said your parents were wrecked, but how about you?”
“It affected me, sure. We weren’t exactly close…Brian wasn’t what he seemed. Hell, it’s complicated.”
She waited. She could feel him struggling with his own emotions. “Tell me, Rick. Please.”
For a second, he disappeared from behind his eyes, hiding out as he’d seemed to do that first day, and off and on since, going from interested to watchful, easygoing to intense. Friendly, but not fully present, and very wary.
But then he returned to her, as if dragged by an intimacy he couldn’t resist, like an animal drawn from the forest by the warmth of a campfire on a cold night.
“Brian didn’t get shot helping a client,” he said. He pushed himself to a sit, grabbed a pebble and tossed it into the creek, watching the ripples swell outward. He didn’t look at her, just continued speaking, his arm on one bent knee. “He went there to buy coke.”
“Really?” she asked, sitting up to be sure he knew he had her full attention.
“Oh, yeah. His client was a low-level dealer and Brian already owed him for a grand’s worth of product he’d ‘borrowed’ to sell to his yuppie friends, but snorted instead. He showed up wanting more, can you believe it?”
“Oh, dear.”
“Yeah. My brother had cojones. But the dealer was already in deep with his supplier, who sent someone to whack them both. Nine millimeter. Mowed them both down in seconds.”
“How awful.”
“Yeah.” He shifted his body to look at her now. “I knew one of the cops on the case and he kept the drug angle out of the report, so it looked like just a drive-by. Better for my parents. They think Brian was so brave helping that poor innocent client in that deadly neighborhood.” His smile was crooked.
“You protected them,” she said. He’d prevented them from hearing hard truths about their older—and favored—son. She understood that impulse. She was doing the same in a way with her own parents. If they knew about Bedroom Eyes, what pride they had in their only child would fade to black, she was certain. Better they didn’t know.
“Did the client get your brother hooked on drugs?”
Rick gave a silent laugh. “No. Brian managed that all on his own. My brother liked things to go easy and feel good. Drugs were a shortcut to that. He liked shortcuts. That’s why he chose criminal defense. Lots of rich scum happy to pay plenty to stay out of prison.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Don’t get me wrong. Brian wasn’t a bad guy. He was always good to me. Loaned me money, found me a job once, sent me his friends’ cars to work on. He just didn’t mind working the system to get what he wanted.” He paused. “He sort of got lost.” He shot her a look full of anguish.
“It happens sometimes,” she said.
“Yeah. But I didn’t step in. I was too busy taking my own shortcuts. Not drugs, but anything else that felt good or wild or fun.” He tossed another rock, this one more fiercely.
“You couldn’t live your brother’s life for him,” she said gently. “If you’d tried, he’d probably have told you to go to hell.”
“Did you know him?” He was trying to joke, but she could tell her reassurance hadn’t gotten past the barrier in his eyes. He felt responsible for letting his brother’s life end the way it had. I think you earn love and guard it with everything in you. That was Rick’s belief and, in his mind, he’d let his brother down. Her heart ached for him. Here was the source of the pain and loneliness she’d seen. It was Rick’s self-imposed exile because he didn’t think he deserved love.
“And after he died, you changed your life?” He’d gone into the army, she recalled.
“I turned it around, yeah. Brian’s chance to straighten out, do the right thing, get married, have a family, all that was gone—” he snapped his fingers “—like that. So I had to make up for it, do what he couldn’t do.” His sense of mission burned in his eyes.